Now that ICANN has announced the 1,930 applications for new top level domains, SIIA is busy reviewing applications and looking for opportunities to protect intellectual property rights.
After a day of review, it’s clear that most of the applications appear to be “speculation” on common, generic terms—similar to the way registrants staked out claims in second-level names in the early days of the .com registry. The remaining applications were community applications, geographic applications, brand owners reserving their “.brand” strings, and some applications that were not translated on the list.
Below are some initial statistics on the applications:
• 1930 total applications, including 1409 unique strings and 754 in conflict or in multiple conflict
• 84 community based designations
• 66 geographic designations
• 116 are not translated on the list
• 911 of the applications came from North America, 675 from Europe, 303 from Asia-Pacific, 24 from Latin American and the Caribbean, 17 from Africa
SIIA’s biggest area of focus moving forward will be on the details of how the domains will be operated, with an eye toward intellectual property rights protection mechanisms, Whois database implementation, and other registration requirements.
SIIA’s Chief Litigation Counsel Scott Bain weighed in on potential areas of concern for IP rights holders:
“ICANN’s program may open up new opportunities, but it also presents a whole new frontier of potential—and likely—abuse by those seeking to profit from the name, reputation, and content of others.” – Washington Post
“They could take registrations on unlimited variations of trademarked names. Or they could have websites selling content without the authorization of the content owner. It just multiplies exponentially the cyber-squatting that already occurs with dot-com.” – SF Chronicle
SIIA will continue to seek out opportunities for public comment and consultation with the US government.
Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA.